steps to realize a sustainable open-access friendly healthcare communication

While nobody can predict what changes the American Health Care Act will bring, two healthcare trends seem certain to continue under any environment: the move toward more value and outcomes-based care, and health consumers’ growing adoption of digital and social media tools. Though motivated by different forces,these trends as deeply intertwined, and predict their continued convergence will have major implications for healthcare communications.

In a fee-for-service environment, everybody is incentivized based on the volume of care they provide. When a previously treated patient returns to the hospital, the hospital gets to perform more services and send a new bill. But increasingly now, doctors and hospitals’ incentives are becoming aligned with the quality of the care and overall population health outcomes. In Medicare ACO arrangements, for example, health systems that cut costs while meeting health benchmarks for their patients get to share in the savings. A patient’s re-admission eats away at profits.

Deliver better healthcare through effective use of secure mobile messaging

We’re seeing a similar trend in pharma too, where drug companies are experimenting with value-based contracts with insurers that require them to return money if patients fail to achieve expected results. Pressure on pricing is also shifting attention to outcomes.

For providers and drug makers alike, this new environment means it’s no longer enough to simply market and sell treatments. Our industry must also think holistically about patients. If you sell a drug that a patient forgets to take, or if a patient’s poor health habits erode the benefits of his treatment, outcomes will suffer. Factors like adherence and lifestyle become as central to the equation as sales volume and efficacy.

It’s well established that communication skills and regular contact between provider and patient help improve these outcomes. And that’s where the second trend comes in: the rise of mobile health (mHealth) and healthcare social media. Patients are adopting a stunning new range of interactive tools like medication reminder apps, activity trackers, social media channels and online forums to help themselves manage daily health needs. Much has been written about how these tools are empowering patients to become more active participants in their care. But less appreciated is how these digital and social tools can also bring efficiency and scale to healthcare communications. Patient-doctor relationships were once confined to exam room visits and Sunday newspaper columns. Today’s digital world offers hundreds—if not thousands—of additional touch points.

These tools offer tremendous opportunities to deepen relationships and communication, but also add to the skills clinicians, insurers and pharma companies must master.

Let’s take a closer look at the new communication priorities required to thrive in the new value landscape.

Understand patient needs

Drug companies convene patient focus groups to test ad campaigns, but this level of examination can be applied to all parts of the patient experience. Social listening is one powerful tool to accomplish this. You’d be surprised at how much detail people share about their conditions in online forums. Through these messages, we can construct intimate portraits of a condition, including what information people seek at different stages of their journeys and the common pitfalls where their adherence gets disrupted.

Engage directly with consumers

Although more and more healthcare industry companies are becoming active on social media channels, few are truly exploring the possibilities of two-way communications. We can improve by asking open-ended questions on Facebook and then listen to the responses. We can look for people seeking help online, then leverage company expertise to provide answers. We can produce live streaming events that use social media to facilitate dialogue that builds relationships and trust.

We can also help by training doctors—the most trusted figures in the health ecosystem—to be more involved with patient communities on social media. The primary care visit offers doctors a face-to-face opportunity to explain the importance of diet and exercise to patients. But imagine how much more adherent patients might be if the doctor could reinforce this message continually throughout the year? Or how we could improve population health if reminders about routine screenings came from intimately trusted authorities. With strategic use of Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat for educational messaging, this becomes easy—and efficient.

Create content that resonates

The Internet is full of factual information that nobody actually reads because they’re too busy devouring misinformation that’s fun to share and click on. But when health outcomes matter, we must compel patients to tune in to health messaging they might otherwise ignore. We can compete in this battle for mindshare by weaving health issues into evocative narratives of real people, or by expressing complicated scientific concepts in relatable everyday terms. Selecting the right spokesperson is another way to capture attention.

Meet people where they are

We already know that well-run patient service programs help people navigate the obstacles of starting a new treatment. The next step is to make sure these programs integrate seamlessly into patients’ lives. For most demographics, this means optimizing for smartphone use. As mobile messaging continues to grow, we should explore chat extensions for nurse navigator hotlines.

Similarly, it’s important to make sure information and programs are available on the platforms our audiences use most. More pharma companies are establishing branded presences on Facebook, the world’s most popular social media platform. And now that scrolling ISI is available in Facebook ads, it is getting easier for pharma to participate.

Don’t shy away from difficult topics

Increasingly, social media is becoming the place where patients go to sound off about concerns with pricing and access. My colleague Meg Alexander, head of Risk & Reputation Management at inVentiv Health Communications, recommends companies be prepared to communicate about the value their medicines deliver to stakeholders who use Twitter or Facebook to raise concerns about affordability. They must also make out-of-pocket cost assistance information easier to find and simpler to understand. In terms of building relationships, there’s a world of difference between demonstrating you are listening and appearing to dodge difficult questions. Furthermore, patients cite drugs costs as a major factor in nonadherence, so raising the visibility of assistance programs has the potential to affect outcomes.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Human Element

While it’s easy to get excited about new gadgets, remember that the overall goal of mHealth and social media must be to deepen relationships and communication. For example, telemedicine can connect elderly and disabled patients with specialists who would be hard to visit in person. Step counters come with apps that create social communities that encourage participation. Be wary of advances that aim to displace human interaction. The power of these new technologies is realized when there’s a caring, concerned person on each end. A recent study found that simple medication reminder apps did not improve adherence.

As the healthcare system continues its shift towards value-based models, genuine, personal communication will only increase in importance. Where writing a prescription used to be the end of interaction, we should now see it as the beginning of a relationship. Digital and social media tools must be recognized as a standard part of quality care.

Source

how common is texting within the healthcare space

Deliver better healthcare through effective use of secure mobile messaging

There’s no doubt that the reach of technology is widespread in the U.S. today. But how about in the healthcare system? As alluring as it is to discuss health tech startups, artificial intelligence and telemedicine, it’s crucial to move back to the basics.

In the hospital setting, providers rely heavily on devices for patient care-related communication. But what types of devices are they using? And just how up-to-date are they?

A recent survey, titled “Hospital-based clinicians’ use of technology for patient care-related communication” and published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, took a closer look.

Researchers utilized a Society of Medicine database to conduct the survey of hospital-based clinicians across the country.

Out of 620 respondents, 495 received pagers from their respective hospitals. Approximately 304 of the 620 individuals said they most commonly received patient care-related communication via pager.

Additionally, about 300 out of 597 respondents said they utilize standard text messaging at least once per day. Surprisingly, 21.5 percent of those 597 individuals claimed they got text messages that included individually identifiable information. Another 41.3 percent said they received messages that included some identifiable information, such as patient initials.

Though clinicians claimed they frequently use text messaging, only one-fourth (146 of 549 respondents) said their organization implemented a secure messaging application that some providers were using. Even fewer (40 of 549 respondents) reported their organization had implemented an application that most clinicians were using.

As the researchers note, pagers are clearly the top choice for communication among clinicians. And while texting is becoming more commonplace, few hospitals have actually installed secure mobile messaging applications.

“The wide range of technologies used suggests an evolution of methods to support communication among healthcare professionals,” the study concludes.

The findings highlighted in the Journal of Hospital Medicine survey further validate the results of a March 2017 survey administered by the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.

Although the survey was conducted among CIOs rather than clinicians, it’s clear that methods of communication are not going unnoticed.

Of the more than 100 CIOs, 39 percent said their hospital only has secure texting for personal devices. Thirty-five percent said their organization utilizes secure texting on hospital-issued devices only. And 26 percent claimed their hospital has secure texting on personal and hospital-issued devices.

Moving forward, healthcare organizations should seek to standardize the devices that clinicians use to communicate. What’s more, these communication devices and methods should be secure, lest patient information is compromised.

Source

how chatbots are working successfully in healthcare; mostly in doctor-patient

For patients and caregivers, the ability to chat with clinical professionals through messaging applications is already a breakthrough in convenience, efficiency, and continuity of care. But as with any major technological shift, challenges arise when it comes to the finer details. For instance, how can health care professionals avoid being inundated with minor questions and requests, when the barrier between patient and doctor becomes nearly nonexistent?

This post will highlight how some of these challenges are being met with artificial intelligence and chatbots, and share a practical example of how “blending” of human and machine will allow this breakthrough to truly take hold in the healthcare market.

The seed of opportunity to bring messaging into the clinical setting is starting bear fruit: a number of companies in the space have successfully brought products to market. Examples include ConversaHealth (digital checkups via messaging) and Sherpaa (concierge medicine via messaging).

Mobile Healthcare Solutions

In these secure messaging apps the patient or caregiver is able to carry a conversation with healthcare professionals involved in their care. This confers a number of advantages over tradition forms of communication. First, messaging app conversations can contain links, images, PDFs and other files. This facilitates the immediate exchange of a wealth of information not possible with voice communication alone. Messaging conversations are also frequently asynchronous – meaning they do not have to occur in live-time. For instance, the patient can ask a question of the nurse on his care team via message in the middle of the night, and the nurse can respond the following morning. This all but eliminates “phone tag”. Lastly, a messaging conversation can include – or exclude – members of the care team at will. It’s no more difficult to transmit information to every care team member at once than it is to contact just one person.

With messaging, communicating with and among a care team becomes as easy as conversing in a Slack channel.

The opportunity for clinical messaging goes beyond human-to-human interaction, however. Consider a simple request from a caregiver, such as “please send me info on hypertension.” Why should a registered nurse take the time to search for a web page, copy the URL and send the link when it’s easy for a machine to discern the intent of the request, and resolve it? Finding these types of efficiencies is possible with what I refer to as “human augmented automatons” — chatbots with human guidance.

In his 2008 book The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen posits that by capturing “institutional knowledge” and decentralizing it towards the patient one can achieve efficiencies, lower costs and improve care. For an example of how this might work in a world of clinical messaging with automation, think of a quick screener — an assessment. It’s a series of interconnected questions given to the patient that collects data from which decisions can be made. Often such screenings are periodic and data must be looked at longitudinally.

Carrying out an assessment is time-consuming work for the nurse or clinician. Yet it turns out that in most cases a machine is better at administering such surveys – consistent, accurate, never forgetful – compared with a healthcare professional.

Clearly, healthcare organizations have no tolerance for the kind of erroneous or inappropriate responses many chatbots have become famous for. The nature of a conversation about health is contextual, collaborative, and carries zero tolerance for absurdity. It’s simply not a place for “AI only” responses. So there needs to be a way to blend automated and human responses with high integrity.

Source

making healthcare marketing hipaa compliant

Searching for health-related information on the Internet is perhaps one of the most popular activities today. Statistics reported by Pew research data indicates that about 72% of internet users have been found looking for healthcare information online. And in an attempt to keep pace with the changing trends, marketers are inclining more towards digital marketing tactics, making it necessary for their digital campaigns to be crafted in adherence to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.

If marketers are not HIPAA-ready yet or are not knowledgable about compliance measures, then it’s high time that they check out these valuable tips to stay on a safer side.

HIPAA compliant HL7 Messaging

Sharing Patient Information is a Big No


With the digital intervention, the health care industry has become vulnerable to data breaches, leaks, and unwanted disclosures leading to misuse of patient data and other medical information. In the light of such an alarming situation, HIPAA rules and regulations came into force for protecting patient confidentiality and satisfying the Privacy Rule from getting into wrong hands via digital channels and marketing campaigns. And so to be HIPAA compliant, marketers need to avoid the use of protected health information (PHI) for marketing purpose in a way that can reveal patient’s identity online.

The best way to deal with the ordeal is to either seek for written authorization for the use of data from the patient itself or segment such information by eliminating identifiers such as names, administrative details, geographic and biometric identifiers, etc.

Don’t Use Real Life Patients Images

Being too desperate to win the digital war can land healthcare organizations into trouble. Making their digital presence HIPAA compliant is mandatory on a marketer’s part to avoid being heavily fined. While trying to decorate the healthcare marketing brochure, the landing pages of the website or their brand’s social media profile, marketers should hire actors or use stock photos to portray patients receiving care or being diagnosed rather than referring to real-life patient photos. Being Ignorant of Minute Details May be Dangerous

Using treatment success stories as examples for marketing purposes is fine only if it does not violate HIPAA rules and places patient data at risk. While narrating the case study or client testimonial as part of marketing, marketers should be careful of what information they are sharing. Even sharing of patient case history and other details via direct messages are considered to be a violation of HIPAA.

Train Your Marketing Team with HIPAA Regulations

What equally matters in the field is how knowledgeable and well informed the marketing team of a medical organization is about HIPAA rules, regulations and punishment details. The people who are the behind the development of any healthcare email marketing campaign, social media blogs, and content marketing campaigns must be competent enough to pass the compliance challenge for their brand. Also, if the marketing campaign involves third-party vendors, then marketers must ensure that they are HIPAA certified to avoid violation of rules.

On a Healthy Note
Though HIPAA has restricted the marketing efforts of the healthcare industry up to certain limits, still it’s not impossible to develop and deliver effective marketing messages to a targeted audience while being compliant. For example, healthcare organizations can market content on general topics such as healthcare tips, educational documents excluding patient-specific data and much more to make sure that their marketing strategies don’t pose security threats to the electronically stored medical information.

Remember, penalties for noncompliance may incur heavy losses for your healthcare business which may range from a potential fine of $100 to $50,000 per violation depending on the level of negligence.

Source

how digital health technologies help long-term health issues

Deliver better healthcare through effective use of secure mobile messaging

Digital technologies have had a game-changing impact on most aspects of our day-to-day lives. But one area that hasn’t yet felt the full benefit of digital is healthcare, in particular preventative health. The main reason being that technology can only get you so far, it then takes a more ‘human effort’ to encourage people to ultimately change their behaviour. To use the old adage: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

As we’ve developed as a society, our perspective on healthcare is that it is something we should all be freely provided with. This is the problem with healthcare as it is today: with treatment so readily available and accessible, people have gained a sense of entitlement to care from professionals, rather than taking responsibility for their own health and preventing issues before they require treatment, ultimately placing unnecessary pressure on health services.

This is clearly unsustainable. It is therefore becoming our responsibility as individuals to be more accountable for our own health in order to truly facilitate a sustainable future for healthcare. The obvious place to start is finding preventative approaches to health - in other words, the ‘health’ side of ‘health(care)’.

Helpfully, today we have a new generation of digital health technologies that not only offer consumer friendly features, but more importantly, have been designed with a deep understanding of the human condition, to make it easy for people to adopt healthy behaviours - empowering anybody with a smartphone to manage their own health, without the need to visit a healthcare professional.

There are now a huge number of health monitoring apps and platforms available to individuals, enabling them to improve their health through analysis of data from their daily activities and lifestyle habits. Historically, we have relied on healthcare with the approach of treating issues but, with access to insights on our health now available, this approach is outdated. For many, simply knowing you need to sleep more or consume less alcohol isn’t enough to make a positive change but, as health tech is adopted, it seems having a platform which directly informs you of issues, with evidence gathered from monitoring of your everyday activity, is.

Many long-term health issues stem from everyday lifestyle behaviours which can be prevented should individuals be aware of the causes and immediate action they can take. As technology advances and more individuals adopt a preventative and self-managed approach to their health, we will be able to significantly reduce the prevalence of preventative diseases such as type 2 diabetes and alleviate pressure on health services worldwide.

By implementing technology which encourages self health management, healthcare providers can help prevent diseases by supplying suitable products to vulnerable individuals and providing tailored care plans based on personal data.

At present, the health tech space is nurturing a growing number of individuals to adopt the use of wearables and using niche health apps targeted to monitor one specific area of their lifestyle. However, evidence shows many people discontinue use of devices such as smartwatches or fitness trackers because they don’t find them useful or are unable to draw conclusions from the data they gather. The next step in health tech is not just gathering data, it’s making sense of it and providing recommendations from self improvement.

There are now platforms available which bring together all health and lifestyle data tracked from the multiple devices people use and combine results to provide recommendations for prevention or pre-treatment of issues. This is the future of healthcare and where we will begin to see real change, but the key behind this is to engage people with their own health and empowering them to take control and become self-accountable, rather than rely on health care systems, something we have been guilty of for far too long.

Source

why messaging fails to meet hipaa requirements

Using a smartphone to send a quick text message or e-mail has become second nature to most of us. But some healthcare providers take advantage of that convenience to communicate with colleagues and patients, not realizing that they could be violating HIPAA regulations by sending protected health information (PHI).

Consultants and attorneys who work with providers on HIPAA compliance say texting PHI is a fairly common problem. SMS text services and Apple’s iMessage do not meet HIPAA requirements that insist providers maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of PHI. Among the troubles with text messaging are keeping information from being seen by an unauthorized recipient, keeping it secure, and making sure the information is available in the patient’s medical record.

Deliver better healthcare through effective use of secure mobile messaging

Behavioral providers who would like to use text messaging must exercise caution, says Sharon Hicks, a senior associate with Open Minds, a market research firm focused on health and human services. “Being able to informally communicate with people who are in treatment situations has shown some efficacy in studies,” she says, “but the technical aspects of getting it done correctly are arduous and keep people from exploiting the technology as broadly as it could be used.”

For example, she says, some studies indicate that text messages offering encouraging statements are reinforcing and help people stick to a care regimen.

“The difficulty is that you have to be careful not to put any protected health information in those messages,” she says.

And it’s just the content of the messages alone that must be considered.

“If a message includes personally identifiable health information, the principal risk I have seen is an unintended recipient,” says Nathan Mortier, an attorney with the firm Mellette PC in Williamsburg, Va. “We have all texted the wrong person. Many providers don’t realize that if they are going to be texting health information to other providers, if they text the wrong person protected health information, it becomes a breach subject to pretty stringent reporting requirements.”

Also, there could be medical decision-making taking place in a written format that is not being saved in the patients’ records, and therefore not available to future providers caring for the patients or the patients themselves.

“What we have seen is that texting often replaces phone calls,” Mortier says. “Phone calls are not recorded and added to the medical record, but texts create a written record, and written records need to be included in the patient’s medical record if they include PHI and are relevant to a patient’s care,” he says.

Secure messaging apps

For messaging between providers, there are a number of new apps available on the market, and many of them purport to be compliant with HIPAA requirements. These apps generally require that individuals log in with a specific user name and password beyond what is on the mobile device. This helps ensure that the person entering information or using the service is verified, Mortier says. They may also have features that help automate the routing of messages to electronic health record (EHR) systems. Some EHR vendors are starting to offer add-on integrated secure messaging services.

Likewise, some health texting apps also include a feature that will limit the universe of recipients of information.

“Instead of having access to their entire contact list on your phone, it might only allow texts to other providers involved in that patient’s care,” Mortier says.

Another important feature of these applications is that they don’t store any information on the device. If a physician logs in to an EHR or secure texting app on a phone and views information, as soon as they close the app, that information is gone.

Many providers do some type of secure messaging with patients through their EHR’s patient portal. But as Open Minds’ Sharon Hicks notes, if you are trying to interact with someone on a daily or weekly basis, it becomes a burden for them to log in to get a secure message.

“If I am willing to log into the patient portal, you know I am already engaged,” she says. “Secure messaging is a potential way to help engage people who are not easy to engage.”

Healthcare-focused messaging services will eventually become popular, Hicks predicts, because both consumers and providers want an informal and easy way to communicate. “We are in this world where texting is normal, and it is much easier. We haven’t created the work flows to take advantage of all the new technology,” she says, “but people want ease of use and self-service tools because that is what they are used to in all other aspects of their lives.”

Expanding the use of text messaging

One behavioral provider network that relies heavily on its technology platform is considering how text messaging can play a bigger role in patient communications. New York-based AbleTo operates a network of 300 licensed therapists and behavior coaches around the country, providing psychotherapy to patients via phone or secure video on a proprietary platform it has created.

“Currently we are using text messaging as appointment reminders and for rescheduling, but when we think about text messaging, it is really about extending the treatment experience,” says Aimee Peters, chief clinical officer. “We have a patient portal that has digital tools available to the patient. As an extension of that, we think about providing notifications and suggestions to practice at home the skills they learn in therapy sessions.”

Text-based support provides an opportunity to celebrate wins and success, Peters adds. Patients can let therapists know they made progress or had an important event or breakthrough, and providers can reinforce that through text messaging back to the patient.

Source

3 factors to keep in mind before patient engagement via sms

Mobile Healthcare Solutions

A patient wants to engage with his or her physician via email without going through the secure channel of a portal. Is this allowed, and should physicians consider it?

According to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, physicians and patients can exchange unsecured emails as long as patients are aware of and accept any potential privacy and security risks.

“It’s critically important that healthcare providers, payers and their technology partners design and implement systems that serve patients’ needs first and foremost,” says David C. Harlow, JD, MPH, principal at The Harlow Group, LLC, a healthcare law and consulting firm. “This includes respecting the patient’s right to choose ease of use over high security.”

However, obtaining patient consent is critical, says Harlow. Physicians can ask patients to physically sign intake paperwork stating the physician may contact them via unsecured email or text messages. They can also ask patients for their consent over the phone or via a secure message through the portal. Electronic signatures are sufficient, provided they meet federal and uniform state laws, he adds.

Harlow encourages physicians to take a thoughtful approach to unsecured communications.

“Given the sensitivity of the information being shared—and the potential for negative consequences if the information is intercepted or misdirected—it makes sense to go above and beyond the bare minimum requirements of clicking an ‘I agree’ box on a screen,” he says. For example, physicians could require patients to type their name or initials to signify consent. “Taking that extra step makes it more likely that a patient actually reads the consent,” he adds.

However, it’s important to set boundaries.“Texting creates an expectation of instantaneous response, and that’s really hard for practices and individual physicians to maintain,” says Jan Oldenburg, FHIMSS, chief executive officer of Participatory Health Consulting, a company that helps physicians use digital health technology to engage patients.

Consider using an automated reply letting patients know that the practice will respond within 48 hours and that they should call 911 in the event of an emergency, she adds. These same strategies are appropriate in establishing response standards for secure messaging.

Source

patient prefering sms for medical appointments

Surveys have shown that patients, including dental patients, prefer to communicate with their health-care providers via text. This is more convenient for today's smartphone-carrying patients, and leads to reduced no-shows.

The days of depending on postcards and voicemails for appointment reminders might not be over just yet, but they’re coming to a close due to the rising popularity of text messaging as a communications channel for many dental offices and health-care providers. With more than 240 million smartphone users in North America in 2017, consumers have grown to depend on, and demand, text messaging services that allow them to interact with the businesses and brands they use and trust.

A recent national survey found that consumers overwhelmingly prefer using SMS over email and voice communications when engaging with businesses, finding it more relevant and timely:

● Respondents read 82% of their text messages within five minutes, versus opening only one in four business emails.

● Nearly half of those surveyed (47%) stated they would react negatively if a company did not offer SMS as a communications channel.

Dental offices, pharmacies, and other innovative health-care organizations are increasingly leveraging SMS as a strategic communications channel to make the patient experience easier and more convenient. Here’s what it can accomplish.

Reducing no-shows—Missed appointments have a big impact on a health-care provider’s revenue. On average, about 10% of dental appointments are no-shows. However, with well-executed appointment reminders, dental practices and other appointment-based businesses can minimize the number of no-shows and increase their revenues as much as 20% Patients have responded well to this move. In fact, 55% of the survey respondents noted text messaging as the preferred method of communication of appointment reminders versus email, which was preferred by only 35%.

Maximizing schedules and minimizing operational costs—SMS has also been shown to optimize appointment schedules and staffing. Offices with waitlists have the ability to text patients with last-minute openings, which allows patients to fill appointment slots, and the staff on hand stays busy during what could have been a down time.

SMS is also more efficient than phone calls in terms of time. Weave, a patient communications software company, notes that the average phone call takes about 90 seconds, while the average text message takes only 13 seconds to send. This adds up to a savings of about 12 hours per month, not to mention that patients are happy they have a quick and intuitive way to coordinate their appointment scheduling.

Mobile Healthcare Solutions

Keeping patients engaged between visits—Messaging can play a key part in ensuring that patients continue their at-home care between visits. Smartphone apps can send users text reminders to brush and floss, and can send notifications for tasks such as taking premedication before a dental visit. Preventive care reminders and others like these establish a strong patient-provider relationship and may increase the likelihood that patients will return for regular cleanings.

Giving patients a choice of communications methods (phone, direct mail, SMS, etc.) gives them the flexibility to interact with their dental office in the way that feels most comfortable to them. Creating an enjoyable patient experience goes beyond just what happens during an exam or dental procedure.

Source